As Chad slipped a print into the developer, I glanced over at him and realized it had been a couple of weeks since we’d been together. Under the warm red wash of the safelight, I felt a sudden pull, the familiar, weak-kneed feeling I got around Chad. I waited until I couldn’t stand it a second more.
I moved closer, behind him, reaching around to his chest, his stomach, which tightened under my hands, and then I reached lower, and he abandoned his photo in the developer and turned around. He pressed me back into one of the enlarger booths, lifting me up so that I was propped against the counter, and I could hear the enlarger, heavy as it was, rattling behind me as we banged against it.
It wasn’t until just after that I realized I hadn’t even thought about a condom, and neither had he. But we were careful most of the time, and I shrugged it off even though I knew too much biology to have been so careless, so cavalier. We were breathing as though we’d just run ten miles, flushed and sated as we found and handed each other the items of clothing we’d strewn across the painted black floor.
Chad returned to the tray of developer, where his photo had turned black. He tossed it out and started again. My portrait already done, I hovered around in a sort of afterglow; I had nowhere else to be.
Chad had spent the day out at Eagle Bluffs, a conservation area of mostly forest and wetland that, because this was Missouri, was better known for its fishing and hunting than for birding and wildlife. His portrait was of a weathered old fisherman, and it was exquisite. Chad had captured the man’s features, his concentration; he’d caught the history of the man’s face in perfect light, shadow, and depth.
It was because I’d recommitted to my work with Pam that I’d chosen her for my portrait. She was among a minority of women on the science faculty at Mizzou, and I thought it would make a nice piece for my portfolio. I’d photographed her in the lab, whipping out my camera with the sole intention of getting the task done, not thinking about the light, the angle, or of taking a variety of shots. When the image first emerged in the developer, I liked what I saw—Dr. Pam Harrison in her white lab coat, bent over a microscope, a wisp of dark hair falling from behind her ear, eye wide open at the eyepiece. But later, when I saw Chad’s portrait, I glanced over at mine, already hung to dry, and saw that it looked flat, emotionless, static. Most of all, it seemed to be a symbol of everything I had in store for myself: a dull, colorless life of feathers and data and little else.
I looked away from the image of Pam’s face and, trying to distract myself, leaned over the sink as Chad agitated a new piece of photo paper. I watched the image of a bird emerge, a wood duck he must’ve seen at Eagle Bluffs while he was shooting the portrait.
“Wow,” I murmured. “She’s beautiful.” The image was black and white but captured the gray scale of the female of the species perfectly: her smooth-feathered face, her white-shadowed black eyes, her salt-speckled breast.
And then I noticed that the image was a little blurry, that Chad was agitating the photo more vigorously than he needed to, as if to hurry up the process—and that his lens hadn’t been focused on the wood duck in the foreground but on a woman, long-haired and smiling, stretched out seductively on a blanket.
I released my prints from their clothespins and stuffed them into my folder. I mumbled that I had to go, and Chad, still busy with his photo, paused and looked at me.
“It’s just a photo,” he said, in a weary, halfhearted way, as if we’d had this discussion a hundred times before and he couldn’t decide whether to try to convince me to stay.
I flung the door open as I left, flipping on the overhead light, exposing his print. I heard his muffled curses as I walked down the long hallway.
Breaking up, such as it was, happened as naturally and unceremoniously as getting together had, as if it was meant to be all along. He never knew about the pregnancy.
BEFORE I LEAVE the clinic, they give me a brochure on birth control, as if I hadn’t known better, as if this had been a mistake of ignorance rather than impulsiveness.
The weeks leading to my appointment had been excruciating. I felt that everyone who looked at me must’ve been able to tell; I worried that Chad would find out somehow, even though there was no way he could possibly know. And my choice seemed inevitable no matter how I looked at it, no matter how many ways I tried to imagine another outcome.
As I walk slowly back to campus, I think of Chad’s photograph, the wood duck, how lovely it was. It feels hypocritical that I wouldn’t dream of eating an animal but that I hadn’t thought twice about ending a pregnancy. Maybe I’ve begun to live too closely by the rules of the animal kingdom, where sacrifice makes sense, where it’s necessary and just and often more humane.